The pay was not good, after a few years working there, new hires were making more than I was. Your entire experience, greatly depends on who you get as a Manager. Their is no consistency between managers and each have their own expectations and agendas. My average work week is ~45 hour and I was told I was not working enough hours. I was constantly doing quality work and I was still getting overlooked for a promotion.Work Life Balance? there is none. Merkle expects you to be on call 24/7. They even make that public knowledge, back in 2011 they did an interview with the Washington Post and David Williams was quoted “If some person is going to miss a kid’s recital tonight because they are taking care of a client, [that] is a practical reality at Merkle,” Just shows how much they really care about their employees when they expect to put work over family. (See more information at the bottom.)There is a lot of Turnover at Merkle, mostly I feel it is because the employees feel expendable. For every employee in the states, they can hire 3 in their Shanghai Office, and that is exactly what they are doing. They are no longer hiring certain positions in the US, and only hiring them in the Global offices.There are no annual bonuses for Merkle employees who are not Managers, and as the workforce, benefits overall are pretty lacking. Vesting in your 401k is 6 years, which is absolutely crazy for this company. Medical and Dental Insurance are on the steep side.Utilization is a huge mess at Merkle, if you are in the middle of transitioning to a new team, they do not look at what your position is, if you are hired as a Developer, you can be moved to a team to "temporarily" fill a spot on the Operations role and then be in that position for over a year. No matter how many times you tell your manager, senior management that you need to be moved into the role you were hired for, they will not move you until they get wind that you are either looking for a new job or you have spoken to someone in HR.

When ever a friend asks me if Merkle is currently hiring, I direct them to this Washington Post article I mentioned above. I feel that it does a good job to help people on the outside understand what the company expects from you and where you stand within the company as an employee. Look for Washington Post Article "At Merkle, all business is personal"

Advice to ManagementAdvice

If you would like to keep the top talent employed at Merkle, you need to provide top level pay/benefits, you need to fix the Work/Life Balance, fix utilization of your employees, and understand that in a lot of cases, families will always come before work.

Merkle's welcomed Cathie Black, celebrated publisher, businesswoman and writer to address attendees at the first event planned in the series this year. The speaker series, which is one element of Merkle’s Women in Leadership program, started out as an internal initiative that Merkle is now extending to include Merkle clients and industry peers.